The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic
The cover of The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic by Jana Milbocker features the Historic Rose Garden at Hershey Gardens in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a garden I have always wanted to visit.
Our 2024 Hosta Catalogue is posted on our website, to read it click here. We are currently taking orders.
Nursery News: Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade. The only plants that we ship are snowdrops within the US. For catalogues and announcements of local events, please send your full name, mailing address, and cell number to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com and indicate whether you are interested in snowdrops, hellebores, and/or hostas. Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.
Carolyn’s Shade Gardens has been selected as one of the 90 must-visit destination gardens and nurseries in the Mid-Atlantic United States in the wonderful new guidebook The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic by Jana Milbocker. This book is a more in depth guide to gardens in our area than Jana’s original 2017 book, The Garden Tourist, which covered 120 gardens from Maine to Pennsylvania. To read my review of the original book and see many beautiful photos of Carolyn’s Shade Gardens through the seasons, click here.
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The page introducing the New York section of the book shows the names and locations of 25 gardens on the right and suggested daily itineraries, each with a stop for lunch, on the left.
This book is a great resource for those of us who love to visit gardens as it covers each garden in depth and includes contact information, photos, hours, admission prices, amenities, suggested daily itineraries, and recommended restaurants for lunch. The Mid-Atlantic guide also greatly expands the number of gardens in each state, for example, the original book covered 12 Pennsylvania gardens and this book describes 36.
You can purchase The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic on the author’s website here (shipping is free), at Main Point Books and Valley Forge Flowers in Wayne, Pennsylvania, or Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, if you are local, or on Amazon here.
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Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware, is a garden I visit every year.
I have visited, photographed, and written about many of the destinations included in the book, so, from personal experience, I can say that they are well-chosen. All my favorite Pennsylvania gardens are included: Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, Bartram’s Garden, Laurel Hill East and West, Morris Arboretum, Stoneleigh, Chanticleer, Jenkins Arboretum, Scott Arboretum, Tyler Arboretum, and Longwood Gardens. And I have already added several of the profiled gardens to my must visit list, including Andalusia, Wyck, and Hershey Gardens, based on the descriptions in the guide.
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The Carolyn’s Shade Gardens page from The Garden Tourist’s Mid-Atlantic.
We are so honored to be included in this wonderful garden resource. Many of our customers purchased the original guide and really enjoyed using it. One longtime customer even brought his copy over so I could autograph the Carolyn’s Shade Gardens page! Autographs are free with hosta orders 😊. Enjoy!
Carolyn.
Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information. If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.) or to subscribe to my blog, just click here.
CAROLYN'S SHADE GARDENS 
May 5, 2024 at 1:27 pm
Hi Carolyn,
You should visit Hershey Gardens! It’s lovely and has far more than roses to offer. It’s got the Butterfly House, the Children’s Garden, sweeping views of Hershey Park and Hershey, a charming Japanese garden over a small lake, and the most extensive collection of weeping trees I have ever seen.
We live in Hershey and have visited the Gardens although not nearly enough. They’re up the hill from us, just below the Hotel Hershey which has gorgeous landscaping of its own on tap. If you can afford to stay there, absolutely do so. The Garden even comes with a summer soundtrack when the wind is right. They’re up-slope from Hershey Park so you can often hear the screams of the damned while admiring the gardens.
And, when you’re finished with the Garden, you can visit Chocolate World (free parking!) and stock up on every type of Hershey chocolates known to man.
Teresa Peschel
May 6, 2024 at 8:00 am
Thanks for the detailed report. Other readers are welcome to chime in with their experiences of other gardens profiled in The Garden Tourist.